300837 Revisiting The Concept of Generations from a Gender Perspective: Insights from the Turkish Context (30-M26: Gender) (S) (WiSe 2024/2025)

We often hear and use the concept of generation in our daily lives. Despite its frequent use, defining it is not always easy. This course will focus on how “social generations” are conceptualized since Mannheim’s canonical work “The Problem of Generations (1928)”. Moreover, the main aim of this course is to reconsider the literature and the sociological understanding of the concept from a gender and postcolonial perspective. The concept of generations is often considered neutral, but it is actually gendered. Furthermore, this concept has been developed from a Euro-centric perspective. Therefore, this course seeks to uncover the gendered and Euro-centric nature of the concept of generations by examining it in the context of Turkey.

Therefore, the structure of the course will be as follows:

Firstly, we will explore the concept of "generations" by studying classical texts that discuss them from a sociological perspective. Then, we will examine how the concept of generations has been approached in a Eurocentric and gendered manner, and we will analyze the relationship between generations and gender from a fresh perspective. In order to enrich the discussion, we will provide various examples from the Turkish context.